My first shooting experience (in my early teens) was at a local Air Cadets range, firing a SMLE III converted to fire .22 rimfire.
All the weight, none of the recoil …
It would seem less than ideal to train guys with a bolt action rifle and then have them go in the field with a semi auto.
Well, yes, it’s far less than ideal. But it’s better than, say training with a broomstick. Which has been done by a NATO military as recently as 2015!
Needs must, and all that.
Bad news when they run into a bunch of guys pretending to be a tank.
Apparently the M1917 Enfield equipped Home Guard units, per Wikipedia:
Many were bought by the United Kingdom through the British Purchasing Commission for use by the Home Guard; 615,000 arrived in Britain in the summer of 1940, followed by a further 119,000 in 1941.[13] These were prominently marked with a red paint stripe around the stock to avoid confusion with the earlier P14 that used the British .303 round.